1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to planning life-cycle events. More particularly, the invention relates to a system and a method for analyzing the results of changes to life-planning decisions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of accounting software for personal computers has allowed greater and simplified access to individual banking and other financial data. Consumers are able to pay their bills, buy stocks and other financial instruments, renegotiate their mortgages, and plan strategies for saving money and freeing themselves of debt—all by using their PCs.
In addition to the increased efficiency resulting from this trend, a consequence of having the majority of one's financial life recorded in one place—i.e. in computer data files—is the ability to do family financial planning with relative ease. Existing software programs, such as Quicken 99™ by Intuit Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., allow a user to compute the amount of money that will be available at some future date, e.g. at retirement, as a result of financial decisions made today, or in the near future. For example, a user might be interested in knowing how much money she will have ten years from today, based on current saving and spending patterns.
A significant impediment to this process of financial planning is the difficulty of comparing the results of different life decisions made throughout the planner's lifetime. Because a planning timeline, i.e. the period over which the plan will operate, can be anywhere from weeks to several decades, changes in variables can have effects years into the future. For example, a slight decrease in interest rates can significantly reduce the amount of interest income over the course of the plan, leaving less money available for education, miscellaneous capital expenditures, retirement, and testamentary devises. Likewise, a capital expense now, e.g., the purchase of a car, means not only the loss of that capital, but also the return that would have been realized on that capital over the remaining n years of the plan.
While these are two illustrative examples, the complexity of life cycle planning is such that many such decisions, i.e. variables, must be made over the course both of living a life, and of making a life cycle plan. Each of these variables can affect the plan in significant ways, and likewise interact with other variables.
The difficulty with today's life cycle planning software is that it is both cumbersome and inefficient. In order to compare two plans having one or more differing variables, a base plan must be duplicated, and the value of the old variable(s) replaced with the new values in the modified plan. Because there are so many variables to input in order to form the plan, finding the one to change can take a significant amount of time. Even worse, if the user wants to restore the plan to its original value, she has to a) find it again; and b) remember what it was set to originally. If the user wishes to compare more than two plans, then yet another copy of the plan must be made. In addition to the inconvenience and unwieldiness of duplicating the plans, there is, from a memory management perspective, a significant amount of inefficiency in replicating a plan comprising hundreds or thousands of variables simply to change a very small number of variables.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a new method of life cycle planning, in which it is easy for the user to rapidly assess the results of changing the value of one or more plan variables. It is desirable to provide a side-by-side (or similar visual) comparison of the plans, including a clear indication of where and how the variables differ. The user should be able to undo or reverse the changes, gradually or instantly removing the differences between, e.g., plans A and B, and should be able to immediately view the results of the changes, as described above.
In addition, it would be desirable for the memory requirements of the second and subsequent plans to be substantially less than the memory required by the first plan—i.e. if the memory requirement of one plan is m, the memory requirement for n plans should be closer to m than to n·m.